


This Is Where I Came In: X-Files Season 8, "Patience"

by PlaidAdder



Series: X-Files Meta [21]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Gen, Meta, Nonfiction, batboy - Freeform, patience - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-13
Updated: 2014-08-13
Packaged: 2018-02-13 00:27:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2130186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In other words, Batboy and Mulder really share some kind of cosmic affinity, and an episode about a half-human half-bat creature with Mulder in it, written by either Darin Morgan or Vince Gilligan, would have been awesome. And all along, I really wished I was watching that episode. Because an episode about a half-human half-bat creature who is taken deadly seriously by everyone involved, including the humor-challenged John Doggett and the in-no-mood-to-laugh Dana Scully (who surely misses Mulder 1000X more painfully than the viewers do)…well, that episode really kind of sucks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Is Where I Came In: X-Files Season 8, "Patience"

 

 

So, this is officially no longer an X-Files “rewatch.” The first time around, I quit watching the show after “Without.” I had an investment in Mulder and Scully and I had an investment in the mythology, and I guess I was willing to give the new guy a chance. But there was nothing about “Within” or “Without” that indicated to me that I was going to enjoy Monster of the Weeks with John Doggett, veteran cop and hard-boiled detective extraordinaire. So when I saw that the next episode was going to involve a giant bat-creature, I bailed.

Well. I have decided that, for the sake of closure, I will see this thing through to the end. So I watched “Patience.” The title is never explained, though I suppose it is meant to refer to the giant bat-creature’s patience in stalking the man who killed its…brother? Father? Fellow bat-creature? in 1956. But really it seems to me less a description than a plea. As in, please be patient as we reconstruct the entire show, we promise it will get better.

My hopes are not high.

One of the reasons that I never got into  _Millennium_ was that its hero, Frank Black, had no sense of humor. He was a craggy-faced hard-bitten stared-into-the-abyss-too-long hardboiled detective guy who had an interest in the occult. He had one tone of voice, which was “bleak and foreboding.” If he was saying “Pass the salt” you would hear it as “the world as we know it is coming to the end times and all we love will soon be as dust and ashes.” I could not bring myself to care about him or his tragic burdens, and the violence got to me. I gave up.

John Doggett has many of the same problems. I like the actor himself marginally better. But he also has no discernible sense of humor. And that is really a problem for this episode, where…well…

I mean come on. It’s Batboy. If there was ever a premise that was CRYING OUT for Mulder’s particular sensibilities, it’s Batboy. Batboy was THE real-life X-File of the 1990s. He was—

OK, maybe you weren’t around for the 1990s and you don’t remember who Batboy is. Here’s his [Wiki](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_Boy_\(character\)#Fictional_background). Essentially there was a tabloid called the  _Weekly World News_ that used to run features about a half-human half-bat colloquially known as ‘batboy,’ complete with photos. Both the photos and the stories were obviously fabricated. But Batboy was the poster child for the twilight world of tabloid news, where you knew any given story was PROBABLY bullshit but you couldn’t totally dismiss it from your mind. Now that tabloid methodology has completely colonized all broadcast news it’s perhaps hard to remember there was a time when the tabloids were confined to a particular rack near the grocery store checkout, but they were, and while they scanned your items on the newfangled bar code scanner you could glance at them and see, along with reports of your favorite celebrities having secret babies and secret rehab and secret facelifts, a headline and pic about Batboy’s exploits. 

In other words, Batboy and Mulder really share some kind of cosmic affinity, and an episode about a half-human half-bat creature  _with Mulder in it_ , written by either Darin Morgan or Vince Gilligan, would have been awesome. And all along, I really wished I was watching  _that_ episode. Because an episode about a half-human half-bat creature who is taken deadly seriously by everyone involved, including the humor-challenged John Doggett and the in-no-mood-to-laugh Dana Scully (who surely misses Mulder 1000X more painfully than the viewers do)…well, that episode really kind of sucks.

I mean it’s mildly interesting watching Scully have to become the veteran X-Filer breaking in the new skeptic. Watching her run the slide projector is bittersweet. We can all get a good cry out of watching her put Fox’s nameplate into a drawer, and making sure that Doggett actually gets a desk. But it’s really not enough.

And even the writing for that interaction doesn’t always make sense. Carter seems to have decided it’s important that they have conflict; but the conflict over ordering the burned body exhumed, for instance, seems weirdly contentless. Each of them seems to change the actual position s/he’s holding based on which position the other has adopted; they’re fighting for the sake of fighting rather than because of a real difference of opinion.

(Plus…Doggett says he spent the weekend reading all the X-Files filing the cabinets Mulder’s office. All those X-Files got burned at the end of Season 5 in “The End.” I know he was supposed to be piecing them together with tweezers at the beginning of Season 6 but…seriously. Are we just forgetting that happened? Also, with Mulder missing presumed dead, and Kirsch in charge, why are the X-Files still open? And why did Carter suddenly decide to give Mulder a terminal illness retroactively, as there is nothing in Mulder’s Season 7 characterization to suggest any awareness of his oncoming doom? And why, after telling him in “Requiem” that “you’re not going out there alone,” does Scully let him go out there alone? And why…oh, never mind.)

I guess the thing is, yes, the mythology’s always been very serious, but it used to be that with the MOTWs, Mulder took a kind of joy in his work that Doggett doesn’t appear to have and that Scully, being depressed and grieving, cannot currently muster. And so as far as the MOTWs go, basically, the only thing keeping you there is an interest in horror itself, which I don’t really have.

Ah well. I guess I was wondering what MOTWs would be like with Doggett, and I guess now I’m finding out. The search for the truth is never wasted effort. Or so I tell myself.


End file.
